Over the past nine years, Americans have watched mobs topple, decapitate, and deface our statues. They have threatened our saints and desecrated our graves. Churches have been firebombed, torched, and stoned. Activists, reporters, politicians, and judges have faced threats at their homes. Families have endured harassment, students and speakers have been assaulted, and ordinary citizens have been besieged while police stood by — or looked the other way.
Nine years of warning signs piled up. We ignored them. We sped past every flashing signal, comforting ourselves with America’s deep well of goodwill and tolerance for disruptive behavior. We closed our eyes and hoped the storm would blow over.
I can’t tell you why it came as such a shock, because we all know one thing more: It was bound to happen. They told us so.
It wasn’t just statues and churches under attack — though history shows that when mobs destroy symbols of faith and culture, they soon target people next. Violence on campus offered some of the earliest and clearest warnings. By 2016 and 2017, speakers such as the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and the Claremont Institute’s Charles Murray required heavy police protection. Others were assaulted outright.
One notorious case at San Francisco State University showed just how far the rot had spread. A mob cut the lights, then chased and trapped former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines. She said a man in a dress assaulted her twice. The crowd demanded a ransom before allowing her to leave. Video showed security rushing her into a classroom as the mob bayed in the hallway.
Despite the testimony and evidence, the university refused to make a single arrest or discipline a single student.
These victims had committed a grievous offense in the mob’s eyes: daring to speak ideas professors and administrators had marked as violent. Campus gatekeepers trained students to treat words as weapons and to defend campuses like fortresses. Conservative, Christian, or dissenting speakers were framed as invading forces to be repelled.
More insidious attacks followed. Swatting — phoning fake emergency calls to provoke an armed police response — goes back to the Tea Party era, but it exploded in the past few years. Targets included elected officials such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), plus legal analyst Jonathan Turley.
By 2025, conservative internet personalities topped the list. In one week in March, attackers mounted 15 known swattings against conservative figures. The threat grew so severe that media companies advised hosts and reporters to pre-register a cellphone number with local police so that responding officers would have a number to call if responding to a “shooting.”
Swatting isn’t a prank. It’s attempted murder. Armed officers are answering a call that claims there’s an active shooter and will enter a home where families sleep. In that chaotic, high-stakes moment, someone can — and often does — get killed.
On the morning of Sept. 10, 2025, the threat we’d been warning about stopped being an abstract danger and became a crushing reality. We knew a sizeable number of left-wing activists had embraced violence as a tactic. We knew too many on the academy-activist circuit treated dissent as a mortal wound to the community. We knew campus administrators shrugged. And yet when a friend, colleague, mentor, Christian, husband, and young father fell to an assassin’s bullet in broad daylight, the world still felt stunned.
We had watched the escalation for years: arson, vandalism, statue-toppling, threats shoved into social feeds and then normalized by influencers and even some officials. We saw mobs target speakers, watched colleges shield agitators and punish critics, and read the posts that cheered harm or called for more. Those warnings were real warnings — not hyperbole. When rhetoric hardens into endorsement, violence follows predictable paths.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that the violence materialized on a sunny Wednesday in September. Maybe our shock came because the victim wasn’t a faceless “other” but someone many of us knew and respected. That intimacy made this horror intolerable.
I can’t tell you why it came as such a shock, because we all know one thing more: It was bound to happen. They told us so.
Blaze News: FBI investigating whether pro-trans radicals knew in advance about assassination plot
BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock: The dark truth about political violence in 2025
Bedford on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” 2021: Statue destruction is ‘always followed by people’
The Federalist, 2021: Hate crimes against Catholics are multiplying (but politicians and media don’t want to talk about it)
Blaze News: Vance tells supporters to call out people who celebrate the murder of Charlie
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